I took a deep breath and once again tried to make my case to her.
There is something you may have heard about me, the reason why some of my old colleagues won’t speak to me any more. That wasn’t why Sarah was leaving me – indeed, she left me on the morning before the night the other catastrophe happened, and she came back two days later because of it. That was the best bit about falling apart: it persuaded her to come back to hold me together. There wasn’t anyone else who could have, and Sarah still cared enough to want me in one piece. The only other person I wanted to speak to was my former boss and closest male friend, James Cockburn, but he was in hospital with two broken legs and a dead mobile number. Under the terms of the settlement I had signed I was not supposed to contact him or any of my former colleagues. That was mostly fine. I had surrendered my own phone to the police as evidence and I used this as another excuse not to confront my shame through other people’s eyes.
Sarah came back and, to begin with, something incredible happened: we fell completely in love again. Now our time was finite, we decided to make it last for ever. We saw in each other’s faces what we used to talk about when we talked about love, we pinned down the word to describe this purity of feeling and intent. It was not a lie invented by poets, and if it was, who cared, it was the best lie they ever told. Love: at this late hour, you could still fall in.
For the rest of the month we drank and went to galleries, we took ecstasy and danced, we went to bed after ambitious dinners and expensive wines and lay on the sofa under a duvet with hangovers and high-quality HBO drama on DVD. But it was a paradise only made possible by its expiry date. This last month with Sarah had begun with us giving a month’s notice on the flat and with Sarah deciding she was not coming to Argentina on the holiday we had booked to visit her oldest friend Lizzie. I didn’t want to go without her but she made clear that was irrelevant. My boarding the plane was the condition of her staying with me until I did. We talked about Buenos Aires as the ideal place to write the novel I had always talked about: cheap, literary, atmospheric (we presumed). And haunted too, by a man I had watched die. You know of course who I am talking about. I had known the famous novelist for only ten hours but I would not let myself forget him or pretend it was not my fault he was dead. Ten hours, whatever others might say, is long enough to come to love a man. In Buenos Aires, where he had written his first novel, I hoped I could wrap myself in his experience and write mine. It was the only plot I could come up with, an escape and a penance rolled into one, and Sarah called my bluff and decided it was the answer to her problems too. My going alone would give her time to think things through without me. She might join me later; we would ‘have to see’. We closed our eyes because we did not want to see what scared us, though it could still see us.
Four weeks we had, twenty-eight mornings when I woke with her next to me again. It was like plunging into water from a great height and swimming to the surface to gasp for air. To be alive and know how nearly we weren’t.
I wanted to remember this feeling when I was gone from her, so I would never be complacent again – but I didn’t kid myself there weren’t equal and more alluring devotions in store for me. Good intentions? I’d had those before.
‘Liam, please,’ Sarah said, forcing a smile and cutting me off. ‘It’s our last morning together for a while. Let’s just have some breakfast.’
I wasn’t hungry but at least the ritual of making breakfast was something I could do for her. I moved towards the fridge. On the top of it was a delicately curved pot painted with intricate patterns by an ex-boyfriend of Sarah’s from Brazil. Sarah worked in the art world, curating small shows and finishing a PhD, and our flat doubled as a gallery displaying the works of Sarah’s previous boyfriends and current suitors. She referred to the current suitors, with less suspicion than me, as ‘friends’.
‘Why don’t I make breakfast for once?’ Sarah said, jumping up.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, picking up a box of eggs.
‘I want to do it. I’d been planning to. It will be nice. A farewell breakfast.’
‘Farewell?’
‘I mean, bon voyage.’
‘I think you mean fuck off.’
Her eyes narrowed at me.
‘Sorry, I’m joking.’ I put my hands up in surrender and sat down at the table. ‘One fuck-off breakfast and a cup of tea, please.’
Behind her on the wall was a colourful mural. There was a lot going on: helicopters, skeletons, marijuana leaves, bare breasts, men with moustaches, manacles, rifles, horses, stars-and-stripes on fire. I would be in a different continent tomorrow, one where my dead friend had written his first novel and fallen in love.
‘How much space do you think you have to joke right now?’ Sarah asked me. ‘Because it’s not as much as you think.’
The famous novelist I watched die has a name, one which to this day deters me from entering bookshops. It will be obvious that I am talking about Craig Bennett, though when I tell my story for the first time he is always the famous novelist. It adds ironic distance to the story that was not there, is not there, but is essential to the way I semi-survive these days. He haunts me you see, that lovely, corrupt man. In newspaper articles; in marketing emails from Amazon; A0-sized, six feet high on train platforms. I do well making light of it. He survives in his words, say the idiot fans, the ones you hear on Radio 4 saying, of course, Buenos Aires was the biggest character in his debut. Don’t get me started on that type of idiocy. He survives in his words. For me he continues to die. I made sure of that.
The end of my night with Craig was horror, pure and simple. And it was my fault.
* * *
While Sarah made an omelette and I kept quiet I saw there was an opened envelope on the table, stamped Universidade de Sao Paulo. Sarah had been interviewed two weeks earlier on Skype for a job teaching a course there over the summer (their winter, hotter than our summer).
She put down our plates of food and saw what I was looking at. ‘I got the job,’ she said.
‘Congratulations. That’s really great. I really mean that. When do you start?’
‘I haven’t worked out yet if I’ll take it.’
‘That’s really really great – what, really? You won’t take it?’
‘My deadline for my PhD’s this year and . . .’
‘Really?’
‘Stop saying really. You don’t know what really means. Anyway, I probably should take it. It’s only for six weeks and I could use their library for some stuff it’s hard to get over here.’
‘When does it start?’
‘Oh, er, not for a couple of months.’
‘We wouldn’t be that far away then, would we?’ I suggested.
‘Quite a distance.’
‘Same continent, though.’
‘Sort of from here to Moscow.’
‘Just round the corner. I could pop over for a weekend.’
‘Flights would be expensive. I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.’
She was wearing pyjama bottoms and a vest top and I leaned down and put my head against her neck, smelling her hair, cheap shampoo and carpet static, feeling the warmth of her skin, the shape of the line from her cheek to her shoulder. She was unique in a way I could never truthfully express. The idea of chemistry we rationalise in conversation is chaotic in sensation. I was infatuated. It was the sound of her voice on the telephone, the absence of her body in the clothes hanging up in the wardrobe, spread out upon the floor. The way she walked down the street when she didn’t know I was looking at her. It was true. She made me want to skip. I had made her believe that my love for her was